


SLD Case Report: The Andretti Investigation

by tptplayer5701



Series: "Mind Games"-verse [36]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crime Fighting, Crimes & Criminals, Drug Addiction, Drug Dealing, Drugs, Organized Crime, Original Character-centric, Police Procedural, Post-Hawk Moth Defeat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28648812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tptplayer5701/pseuds/tptplayer5701
Summary: A "Mind Games"-verse SLD case:In a world filled with superheroes and super-villains, the regular police and Heroes of Paris cannot handle every potential super-criminal. To face super-powered threats to law and justice, the Paris Police Prefecture recently started a new unit, the Superhero Liaison Department.A small-time Mafia drug lord recently became the face of the Lynchpin's drug-dealing enterprise. The regular police have been compromised too many times by the Lynchpin's moles. The only police department that can handle these potentially-super criminals is Roger Raincomprix's Superhero Liaison Department.
Series: "Mind Games"-verse [36]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1666807
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in a new series I’m going to publish between the multi-chapter stories (similar to the one-shot anthologies), titled “Superhero Liaison Department Case Reports.” Each of these will be 3 chapters and cover a single case, though there will be ongoing story elements connecting the cases together. Also, the majority of the characters in these will be original. The POV character for this one has appeared a few times before now, in [“A Bees' Life”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27630071/chapters/67600745) and the “Life and Times” one-shot [“An Interrupted Walk.”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771119/chapters/68973024)

“You have to give these guys credit,” Ramus observed, dropping his binoculars to hang against his chest and instead using his fingers to rub the tension out of his eyes. “They know what they’re doing. All day we’ve been at this, and not a single slipup. No one has actually touched both the product and the payment at the same time.”

The shutter on Ray’s camera clicked twice in quick succession. “Do you think that’s the Lynchpin or Andretti?” he asked without taking his eyes off the drug dealer on the far side of the street. The two of them had been sitting in their car and watching this corner for three hours already, and in that time they had taken almost a thousand pictures of the dealer, his helpers, and all the customers that had stopped. Ramus had recognized no less than six VIPs in that time, including two members of the Mayor’s staff _and_ a police lieutenant from one of the north communes. The Prefect would _not_ be happy to hear about _those_ possible moles…

“It could be either,” Ramus admitted with a frown. “Andretti’s operation may have been small, but he ran a tight ship. But the Lynchpin… that’s a whole other ballgame.”

“Yeah,” Ray agreed, taking another picture of the town car that had just pulled up. “Andretti never had super-muscle.” One of the dealer’s runners dropped a bag through the car’s open passenger-side window. “Remind me why _we_ ’re on this stakeout when the Heroes of Paris seemed content to work the Lynchpin angle by themselves before now?”

“We go where the Captain tells us to go,” Ramus replied shortly. The younger man hummed dubiously. Ramus relented. “So the Heroes of Paris are a little preoccupied with tracking down all the Lynchpin-ions at the moment,” he explained. “According to the Captain, Rena Rouge doesn’t think they have the time to run this down sufficiently on top of everything else they’re trying to take care of, so they asked us to put the pressure on Andretti’s drug business. Even though he’s supplying the Lynchpin, Andretti’s still pretty small-time – at least by the Lynchpin’s standards – but they don’t want to let him get any bigger, considering who he’s working for now.”

“Okay…” Ray began. “It’s just… when Rainy told me he was pulling me off the street for this new department focused on superhumans I kind of thought things would be a little more… _super_.”

“You thought you’d be driving stakes through vampires, not sitting stakeouts on drug corners?” asked Ramus, raising an eyebrow in amusement.

“Something like that,” Ray acknowledged sheepishly. A man in a shabby coat stumbled up to the dealer’s runner and grabbed his sweatshirt. The runner shoved the man to the ground, and he held out a hand beseechingly. The runner kicked the homeless man in the chest a couple times, until the man withdrew something from his coat pocket and handed it over.

“Did you get a picture of that transfer?” asked Ramus, holding his binoculars up to get a closer look at the scene. The homeless man cradled his ribs, his hands shaking – but whether it was from the beating or the drugs, Ramus couldn’t tell.

Ray nodded. “Yeah. Looked like a necklace of some kind.”

“Must’ve been worth something,” Ramus observed, raising his binoculars again. The homeless man lurched weakly to his feet and shuffled away moments later after receiving a small bag from a different helper. “That bag looked close to ten grams.”

“If that’s the case, then our friend probably got robbed,” Ray commented wryly, snapping a few more pictures of the runner showing the necklace to the dealer, who held it up to the light. “That necklace must be worth at least a few thousand, if the diamond is real.”

“Well, _he_ probably stole it first so…” Ramus knit his brows in thought as another car pulled up to the corner. “How good are your pictures? Could we identify the necklace? Or the buyer?”

“Definitely good enough to get a positive ID on the buyer,” Ray answered quickly, scrolling back through the photographs on the camera. “Not sure about the necklace. Nothing especially distinguishing about it.”

“Hmm…” Ramus frowned. “Still, it could be enough to charge the dealers with receiving stolen property – assuming the necklace was stolen. But that would be more than enough to charge the buyer. Send it in to Vernant so he can start working on a profile. Maybe he can clean up the image to extrapolate something on the necklace.”

“Are we really going to go after the homeless druggie, Lt?” asked Ray doubtfully as a woman in a professional suit approached the runner next.

“Make sure you get a picture of her,” Ramus instructed. “She looks familiar, but I can’t quite place from where. And… yes. The more of their buyers we can arrest, the less buyers they have, and the less product they can sell.”

Ray ejected the memory card from his camera, replaced it with another one, and inserted the first card into his tablet. Without looking he hit the button to transfer all of the files to their department server, even while taking a few more pictures one-handed. “Okay, but…”

Ramus let out a breath. “I don’t like it all that much, either, but even if we can’t do anything about the supply, we can at least cut down some of the demand,” he pointed out.

“There’s always going to be demand,” Ray noted with a scoff. “And wouldn’t it be better to take care of the demand by sending people to rehab?”

“If it worked,” agreed Ramus. “But since when do druggies ever stick with rehab?”

“It happens,” Ray argued, snapping another picture of the next car in line.

“Maybe,” Ramus answered dubiously. “But I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Head’s up,” a voice announced over the radio: Sergeant de Gouges, who had set up two blocks down to watch one of the approaches to the corner. “SUV incoming, dark blue, tinted windows. Looks important.”

Only a couple minutes later the dark SUV pulled up to the corner, and the dealer himself finally rose from his spot sitting on the apartment building’s front stoop. Ray’s camera clicked rapidly as one of the back doors opened and the dealer climbed inside. “Someone was already in the car waiting for him,” Ray muttered. The camera clicked twice before the SUV’s door shut and it pulled away. “I don’t think I got a good shot of him, though.”

“We’ve got movement,” Ramus reported into the radio tersely. “Dealer is moving. Blue SUV, plate number 582-Whiskey-Hotel-18.”

“Acknowledged,” responded Élodie, their dispatcher. “Should I send Unit 3 to tail it?”

Ramus frowned. Moving their other car out of position could mean unexpected trouble if someone came from the wrong direction. Making these kinds of decisions was one of the reasons he had resisted promotion until Captain Raincomprix forced it on him. “Negative,” he finally told her, hitting a couple buttons on the tablet connected to the car’s consol. “We’ll send the drone. Gouger, you’re up.”

The display on the tablet flickered once when the drone activated and connected. As it lifted off out of a car window, they caught a quick glimpse of a woman with short-cropped black hair before the drone ascended to hover above the rooftops. The target SUV became visible moments later, turning down another street. Ramus hit a button on the display to superimpose street names and arrondissement boundaries over the view. While other customers trickled through the corner under the watchful eye of Ray’s camera, Ramus watched as the SUV led their drone halfway across the city, almost out into the north suburbs. Finally, when the drone’s battery life had dropped to around half-power, the SUV pulled into the loading yard of a warehouse. The dealer exited the SUV, followed by two other men. As the SUV left, a semi-truck pulled in right after it and backed straight up to the freight door, parking beside two other trucks.

“Vernant? Are you getting this?” Ramus muttered into the radio.

“Affirmative,” a deeper voice responded immediately. “I’m already checking traffic cams to see if we can trace back where that semi came from.”

“Send the drone in a little closer,” Ramus instructed, leaning closer to the tablet screen. At least six figures were visible in the loading yard, but the drone was still too far away to make out any identifying features. Slowly the drone dropped closer to the warehouse. “Can you capture any usable face-shots, Theo?”

“The angle isn’t great,” Vernant answered. “Let me try–”

One of the faces on the ground looked up in surprise. The drone footage suddenly cut out and turned to snow.

“What happened?” Ramus demanded, smacking the side of the tablet.

“I think they saw the drone,” Ray commented wryly, glancing away from the camera to look down at the screen. “Though that’s just a guess!”

Ramus let out a low curse and turned on the engine. “Élodie, we need to break off the surveillance now. If we don’t move fast, the warehouse’ll be abandoned before we get there.”

“Copy,” Élodie replied smoothly. There was the sound of typing. “Looks like this is the 17th Arrondissement – no local help. I’m switching over to monitor the local precinct’s radios; I’ll let you know if any of their units enter the area. At the moment it appears to be clear of local units for at least three blocks.”

Ramus glowered at the dashboard as he shifted into gear and peeled away from the curb, leaving the dealers behind. He turned on the siren and lights the moment the dealers were out of sight. This was probably the worst part of this new job: he was a police officer, part of a brotherhood of thousands around Paris, yet he could not rely on his brothers in uniform – or at least not all the time. Some of them were working for the Lynchpin and would betray his team’s operation to the criminals if they found out about it. So while sometimes they could work with the local precincts and regular police, as often as not the Superhero Liaison Department was going in on their own without support.

The radio clicked once. “Are you going to be okay with this, Luc?” Élodie asked on a private channel.

Ramus’ mouth twisted up in discomfort, and he looked down to examine his prosthetic. That was the question everyone had been asking for almost three months: was he going to be okay? He sighed heavily. “Yeah. Probably.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The five characters with speaking parts in this chapter are going to be the main SLD team we follow in the “Case Reports.” Roger and the heroes will appear occasionally, but the focus is on the regular police.


	2. Chapter 2

The three police cars arrived at the warehouse less than fifteen minutes after abandoning the surveillance operation to find two of the semi trucks already gone and a flurry of activity surrounding the third one. Ramus resisted the urge to pound his prosthetic on the armrest in frustration. He was the lieutenant now – Roger had told him over and over again that his job was to lead the unit in the field. If he lost his temper, then the unit would fall apart. If he maintained a calm demeanor, then the rest of the unit would operate smoothly. “Watch each other’s backs!” he ordered, twisting the wheel and slamming on the brakes, skidding to a stop lengthwise across the warehouse’s access gate, blocking off half of the main entrance road. Behind him, Gouger mirrored the maneuver, blocking off the driveway entirely with their two vehicles. In the third car, Moreau turned down the street, racing to cut off the only other entrance, the small gate on the left side of the yard.

Ray threw his door open on the side of the car opposite the warehouse and tumbled out, drawing his sidearm and taking a position behind the engine block, aiming across the wide open loading yard at the warehouse front door. Ramus slid across the seat and followed him out, keeping the body of the car between himself and the criminals. At the same time, Gouger and her partner, Wilson, took up positions behind their own car. The energy cannon built into his prosthetic whirred to life as Ramus rested it on the car’s roof and sighted down his arm, counting the visible targets. Even months later, he could still feel phantom pains where his fingers should be, despite the fact that the energy cannon’s barrel covered that very space.

When the doctors had installed the prosthetic, they had assured him it would give even better functionality than the arm he had lost. Admittedly, the doctors had been correct: he controlled the prosthetic with his own nerves and tendons, no different than he had controlled his human arm before the summer, even if the elbow needed to be oiled on occasion. But that was a fair tradeoff in terms of function; his human arm had never been able to deploy a shield or fire energy beams powerful enough to melt through solid steel. At the same time, however, it just wasn’t _him_ ; it was something foreign that just happened to be _connected_ to him. He wondered if it would ever feel like the prosthetic was really a part of him, even after undergoing physical therapy with and without the prosthetic, even after completing the entire police training course using the prosthetic instead of a pistol – and in record time, too. It still wasn’t _his_ arm. And he had lost _his_ arm in a situation eerily similar to this.

“In position,” reported Moreau on the far side of the warehouse.

Ramus narrowed his eyes, pushing away thoughts of the past, and nodded to himself. There were almost a dozen targets visible outside the warehouse, none of whom were even looking at the police; they had glanced over when they arrived, but immediately returned to loading boxes into the semi trailer, their pace only slightly faster than it had been before. Something was off about this picture. “Wilson and I will stay here to provide cover,” he decided. “Gouger, Ray, Moreau, and Roux, move in.”

“Understood, Lieutenant,” Gouger acknowledged before planting her palm on the car’s hood and swinging over it to land inside the warehouse loading yard, holstering her pistol and drawing her twin batons. Ray joined her, and on the far side of the yard Ramus could see Moreau and Roux rounding their car from opposite sides. The four members of his team moved to cut off the criminals from both directions. Behind the car next to his, Wilson had taken a position alongside the cabin, his pistol resting on the car’s trunk for better accuracy. Gouger walked briskly across the loading yard, hunched over almost double, batons held tightly at a low-ready position. Ray jogged quickly to keep up with her pace, his energy pistol leveled past Gouger at the warehouse.

The warehouse door opened from the inside, and Ramus cocked his head in surprise on seeing the person who emerged. His breathing hitched. “Mecha-Man?”

Even as he spoke, a part of his mind realized he wasn’t actually looking at Mecha-Man. The figure was encased in a metal frame the color of steel that held him maybe half a meter above the ground and extended the reach of his arms by the same amount. Most of his body was clearly visible through the exo-suit, though a silver helmet covered his face. Across his arms he carried an enormous pallet with a piece of machinery strapped to the top.

Ramus worked a control on his arm and shouted, “Paris Police!” His voice projected from the speaker built into his prosthetic and echoed across the loading yard, reverberating off the buildings surrounding them. “You are all under arrest! Stand down!”

The men loading the semi made no move to acknowledge his announcement and did not stop what they were doing; the man in the exo-suit walked over to the semi and carefully laid down his burden on the rear loading deck, sliding the forklift-like extensions on his arms out of the pallet and backing away once the pallet was secure. Gouger and Ray were almost halfway across the loading yard by this point. Then the windows along the front of the warehouse dropped open.

“Take cover!” Ramus shouted to his team over their communicators, sending a burst of energy from his prosthetic pouring through the closest window as an energy rifle’s barrel emerged. All along the warehouse front, energy rifles opened fire, most focusing on the four police officers in the open. Ramus ducked down to avoid an energy beam that traced a blackened score across the car’s hood. As the beam cut off he swung up and let off an answering shot back at whoever had fired.

Wilson meanwhile had holstered his pistol and pulled his scoped energy rifle from the car’s back seat. Slapping the battery pack home he laid it across the car’s trunk, adjusted the scope setting, and began methodically working his way across the front of the warehouse, silencing the Lynchpin’s guards with pinpoint shots the moment their rifles became visible through the windows. Ray had dropped to the ground behind a dumpster, using it as cover to fire on the workers near the truck, three of whom had dropped their loads and drawn their own weapons when the warehouse guards began shooting. Across the loading yard, Moreau and Roux had found cover in the gatehouse, though a steady barrage of energy beams from the warehouse side closest to them kept them pinned down.

“Wilson, concentrate on the left side!” Ramus traced a continuous stream of energy across the warehouse at shoulder height, drawing the guards’ attention to him and away from the others. Ramus dropped beneath his car to avoid a torrent of energy that scorched a line across the hood and struck the empty warehouse behind him, burning through the façade and lighting debris inside the building on fire. Ramus aimed under the car and through the warehouse wall at the closest guard, pumping enough energy into the wall to melt a hole through the metal siding. The fire from that guard broke off abruptly and Ramus shifted to the next one down the line as the guards focused all their fire on him.

Meanwhile, Gouger stood up straight and accelerated, running straight across the wide open yard. An energy beam from one of the guards hit her in the shoulder and she let out a pained grunt but didn’t stop. Moments later she reached the workers around the truck. Two dropped the boxes they were carrying and tried to punch her; she ducked the first one and jabbed her baton into the man’s side – he convulsed once and fell to the ground. In the same motion she caught the other’s fist and pushed him back before sweeping his leg out from under him and knocking him down, slamming the butt of her baton into his chest as he fell. As the fire from the warehouse turned to focus on her, Ray broke cover and raced across the open space, diving for cover in front of the truck itself moments before an energy beam split the space where he had been standing moments before. Tracing that shot back to its source, Ramus blasted that location, melting a wide hole through the steel wall and silencing the rifleman inside.

Gouger was pulling on the handle, trying to get into the semi truck’s cab, when the man in the exo-suit tackled her, knocking her to the ground and landing on top of her. Before he could pin her down with one of his arms, she pushed him off onto his back and kipped to her feet. He grabbed her arm with one of his claws, but she pulled one side of the claw back to free herself before whirling around behind him and stabbing one of her batons into his leg. He kicked and knocked her back into the side of the semi, denting the metal. She dropped to the ground on her knees and one hand, coiled her legs, and lunged into his back, knocking him stumbling forward.

The warehouse itself was a flurry of activity, with men pouring out in all directions, racing away from the building. As they fled, the number of guards firing out of the warehouse steadily decreased. On the far side of the yard, helped by Wilson’s steady covering fire, Moreau and Roux had emerged from the guardhouse where they had taken cover and advanced on the warehouse, disarming a half-dozen of the criminals, holding them at gunpoint, and ordering them to lie on the ground with their hands behind their heads. Nearer, Ray had subdued the semi’s driver. However, one man slammed the semi trailer’s door shut and threw the handle to lock it.

“Watch out!” Ramus saw it coming too late to react.

The same man ran up behind Ray, smacked him in the back of the head with his pistol, and swung up into the truck’s cab, locking the door behind him. The truck engine revved, even as Ray rolled away from the truck’s tires, bringing his pistol to bear without any targets in sight.

“Don’t let the truck escape!” ordered Ramus, aiming his cannon at the tractor’s engine.

“Wait!” Élodie shouted urgently. Ramus froze, moments from firing. “Prefect says to let it go if you can track it.”

“Copy.” Ramus shifted his aim and toggled a control before firing. The tracker flew straight and stuck to one of the trailer’s struts. The man in the exo-suit broke away from Gouger, bounded across the yard, jumped onto the trailer’s loading deck, and fastened his claw onto one of the handles as the truck accelerated away. It narrowly missed running over Moreau, drove straight through the fence to one side of the smaller service gate, bounced down onto the street, and sped away. Ramus looked down at the holographic display on his prosthetic and nodded. “Tracker in place.”


	3. Chapter 3

Walking up the front steps of City Hall a few minutes after five, Ramus tried to ignore the looks from the city employees on their way home after work. When Roger had told him that the SLD was going to operate out of the Records Office at City Hall to stay under the radar as much as possible and avoid drawing Lynchpin’s attention the same way that the Brigade de Recherche et d’Intervention had done, he had thought his former training officer might be going paranoid in his old age. They were police officers; they were supposed to wear the badge proudly and protect and serve, not skulk around. And then Roger had described the near-disaster when a Lynchpin mole revealed operational information to the criminals and blew an enormous sting operation wide open. And the reason that sting had been carried out by regular officers instead of the BRI had been because the Heroes of Paris were convinced that either the BRI commander was compromised or half his staff were in the Lynchpin’s pay – though they could not prove it. So rather than purge the BRI (when did they become Internal Affairs), now Ramus was officially a member of Mayor Bourgeois’ security detail, and Roger’s public position was as Executive Director of the City of Paris Records Department. Some guys from his last precinct thought he’d been given a “retirement position” because of his lost arm; in a way he supposed they were actually correct.

He pushed the door open and strode briskly across the atrium to the Records Office, Ray hustling to keep up with him. The secretary didn’t even look up as the two officers entered the room, crossed to the back wall, and slipped into the second office. Élodie Carré, the SLD’s daytime dispatcher, was the only person in the SLD office when they arrived. She turned away from her computer and greeted them with a smile, running a hand through her strawberry-blonde hair.

“Good evening, Lieutenant, Officer.” She raised an eyebrow. “Since you’re here, do you actually have your reports from the week finished for me already?”

Ramus chuckled, set his briefcase, on the desk, and pulled out a sheet of paper. “We had some time to kill while waiting for the prison transport.”

She skimmed the page quickly and snorted. “Are you sure you aren’t overestimating here somewhere?” she asked. “If you and Sergeant de Gouges actually took down as many of Andretti’s shooters today as you claim, he won’t actually have anyone left!”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” mused Ramus thoughtfully.

“So nice,” she agreed before turning to Ray. “Officer Luron?”

“You mean that was supposed to be _today_?” he asked in mock surprise. “Gee, I could’ve sworn I had until the weekend to get those finished.”

“It’s Friday.”

“Huh.” Ray smirked. “Well, ‘TGIF’, then!”

She shook her head and wagged a finger at him in mock sternness. “Tomorrow.”

“Of course.”

Ramus stifled a laugh and nodded toward the elevator. “Is Vernant still in the lab?”

Élodie nodded. “He decided to wait for your report on the drone’s field test.”

“Thanks, El.” Leaving Ray in the office, Ramus crossed the room and rode the elevator down the three floors to the SLD crime lab in silence. As the doors opened he found himself in a brightly-lit open white room that stretched at least a far as the length of the building. It had been in use as a records archive previously, but between digitizing records and condensing the records on the two upper levels of the basement they had managed to empty this floor and convert it into a lab facility for the SLD. In designing it, Vernant had decided to divide off a couple of rooms while leaving most of the center open for weapons testing

Theo Vernant, a slight older man with bronze-toned skin and streaks of grey in his dark hair, didn’t look up from the microscope on his table in the lab room closest to the elevator shaft when Ramus stepped out. He hummed quietly to himself and made a brief note on his clipboard as Ramus entered the lab, stopped across the table from him, and cleared his throat. “I’ll be with you in just a minute, Luc,” Vernant told him without taking his focus off the microscope.

“Is that from the Jellyfish Monster?” asked Ramus curiously. Even after two weeks, they still had no idea where the creature had come from or how it had operated.

“Its structure is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It has many of the characteristics of a Medusozoa, but then it has these little sacs that seem to act more like a Hunter’s organ. But I’ve never seen that in a jellyfish…” Vernant observed by way of response. “I sent out a sample for DNA sequencing, but I haven’t received anything back yet. I promise I will figure it out one of these days,” he assured him before finally straightening up and wiping his brow with the back of a sleeve. “But unfortunately it will not happen tonight. What can I do for you, Lieutenant? How did my drone serve you?”

“Well – at least for as long as it was operational,” Ramus reported, rubbing his prosthetic absently. “Unfortunately something happened to it and it shorted out – not sure what it could have been. Officer Roux recovered pieces of it at the scene, and it looked like it had been melted, though not by an energy weapon.”

“Ah.” Vernant nodded judiciously. “It sounds electrical; it may have shorted out somehow. I did rush this one into use, so a couple wires could have been touching from when I upgraded the camera and antenna. The next one will be better,” he promised. He looked down at Ramus’ hands and furrowed his brows. “But how is the arm?” he asked.

Ramus dropped his arm to his side. “It’s fine,” he answered quickly. “No complaints.”

“You know, if you need any alterations or modifications to it, I’m more than happy to assist,” Vernant reminded him. “Pegasus sent over the design specs, and it wouldn’t be any trouble to make whatever improvements you might need. Espresso maker, perhaps?”

Ramus gave him a dubious look at that but hummed contemplatively. “I suppose the function toggle was a little slow to respond today,” he admitted as the elevator doors opened in the main room and Gouger stepped out.

“I will see what I can do,” Vernant agreed, turning toward the door as it opened. “And how are you this evening, Madeleine?”

Gouger rolled her shoulder and winced. “I got shot,” she commented, raising an eyebrow. “A couple times.”

“You realize there is a simple solution to that problem, do you not?” Vernant observed in amusement.

“Now where’s the fun in _not_ running headlong into the action?” she asked rhetorically.

Ramus shook his head ruefully. “Your definition of ‘fun’ concerns me…”

She shrugged. “Easy is boring.” Turning to Vernant she asked, “Any chance of fireproofing our uniforms?”

Vernant frowned and shook his head slowly. “I have tried,” he told her, “but so far without success. Every fireproof or heat-resistant material I have found has ultimately failed to withstand the high power output of the energy weapons currently in use – at least for longer than a short burst. I will keep trying, though, and I have already sent the Heroes of Paris a request for ideas; they seem to have something they use in their non-miraculous-based uniforms.”

“Sooner would be better,” Gouger pointed out, rolling up the sleeve of her new uniform shirt to reveal an angry red blotch where she had been shot.

Vernant leaned closer and hummed pensively, poking at the redness. “I see. Still, it seems to be healing up nicely.”

“Still hurts,” she muttered.

“I will keep working on it.”

Ramus coughed. “Is the tracker still transmitting?”

“It is working perfectly,” Vernant assured him, picking up a tablet and opening a program. He pointed at a flashing green dot on the map. “It stopped at this warehouse and hasn’t left. There is a traffic camera nearby; it managed to catch an image of your friend in the suit unloading the truck–”

“‘Loader’ is what he called himself,” Gouger interrupted.

“‘Loader’,” Ramus repeated, deadpan.

She shrugged noncommittally. “He shouted it loud enough. He seemed almost _proud_ of the name.”

“And was there anything unique to this suit?” Vernant asked curiously, picking up his tablet to make a few notes.

Gouger shook her head. “It just appeared to improve his base strength, nothing more. Though I think it must have at least _some_ level of energy dissipation or electrical shielding since my taser baton didn’t have any effect on his legs.”

Venant nodded, deep in thought. “Unless he has some sort of weapon he did not display today, this Loader does not sound like he will be more than you can handle, Madeleine. All the same, I will see what I can develop to disable his suit.” He looked back at the tracker program and hummed judiciously. “In the meantime, you ought to bring this to Prefect Raincomprix first, but I would recommend trying to connect Andretti to this warehouse rather than raiding it. If we find evidence against Andretti, perhaps we can use it to convince him to flip and give us Lynchpin.”

Gouger nodded. “If we manage _that_ , it would be the coup of the year!”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ramus agreed, stroking his chin in contemplation. “I’ll write it up for the Prefect and talk to him about it tomorrow.” He looked down at the time display on his prosthetic. “For tonight it’s dinner time. Theo, say hi to the wife, will you? Gouger, up for a drink?”

“Always,” she told him, following him to the elevator as Vernant shut everything down in the lab. They quickly rode to the main floor and made their way out past Mathieu, the evening dispatcher. A couple blocks from City Hall they stopped in at a police bar where they found stools at the bar.

Ramus ordered a couple beers, which they clicked together before he downed half of his in a single long swig. “So how’s the shoulder _really_?” he finally asked, giving her a sideways look.

“It’s fine,” she answered, her eyes still on her mug. “Are you okay after the raid today?”

He chuckled darkly. “This time _I_ wasn’t the one taking energy blasts,” he pointed out, “so I’m good.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.” She finally turned and gave him a hard look.

“I know.” He nursed his beer quietly for a minute. He couldn’t forget the raid when he had lost his arm – the shock of waking up missing a part of his body wasn’t something for which he could ever have been prepared. But he had made it through today – and his team had come through largely unscathed. That could be enough. At least for now. He sighed. “I don’t exactly want to talk about it – but I’m okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tomorrow we’ll return to “Life and Times” for a couple more one-shots and then start the sequel to “The Hound and the Maiden,” titled “The Darkest Nights.” The next “SLD Case Report” will follow “The Darkest Nights.”


End file.
